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Tuesday, 10 February 2015 00:31 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Senuri De Silva
Q: Tell us a bit about yourself. How were you directed to the field of HR and what has your journey in the field been like?
A: My HR career took off about 15 years ago when I started out in corporate development where I was involved in change management and integration of people i.e. in HR parlance Human Resource Development and Organisational Development before moving into Human Resource Management.
I have worked in insurance, logistics, shipping, diversified group of companies, media and entertainment and currently I work for a leading bank. HR is a profession that enriches your job to the extent that you get exposure in diverse industries. From an HR sense, the foundation for my professional evolution stems from having a strong business and financial acumen.
My involvement with HRP dates back to 2005 when I was elected as an Executive Committee member.Thereafter I served as Vice President, in the period 2012/13, 2012/11, 2011/10, and as Chairperson of the HRM Awards International Learning Conference in 2012. Last year I was appointed Chairperson of the HRM Awards for the 2014/15 period.
Today as the President of HRP, I, together with a much respected team of HR professionals from very diverse industries, give leadership to a vibrant corporate HR fraternity in Sri Lanka.
Q: Tell us more about HRP?
A: HRP stands for Association of HR Professionals. HRP is actually the designer alternative to contemporary HR. It is cutting-edge, futuristic and trend-setting. HRP is not the traditional mould of HR organisation. We believe in driving business not just practicing HR but as a true business partner we try to balance two competing ends of employer and employee relationships in a very responsible way.
Today you will find at HRP that many of the HR professionals, especially in the executive teams, have strong orientation in business and finance that propels their careers as respected HR leaders in their own institutions.
Q: What is your vision for the future of HR in Sri Lanka?
A: Speaking of the vision for HR in Sri Lanka, sometime back, it was all about HR professionals’ lack of knowing your numbers and doing your math in the business. I believe that this looking down on the HR approach is not relevant now. HR professionals do understand the business and know their numbers.
Thus, the vision is to embrace technology. Enable digital adoption in the workplace. Technology is driving business. Technology is driving the workplace and whether we like it or not young people who are totally digitised are coming into the workplace.
What are we doing now? We are imposing our restrictive cultures and structures on Millenials and trying to push them within our comfort zone. Are we creating a workplace that the incoming generation wants to be in year after year or are we imposing outdated methods, structures, strictures on them and then stripping them of their creativity?
So the vision is to embrace technology. Don’t wait for technology to go past you and don’t think it’s a terrible thing. If you are doing a workshop for your Millennials in your organisation - and you want to do it in your classroom or training centre where usually no phones are allowed - how can you innovate and make it a more techy experience?
Why not have selfie competitions, free wi-fi zones and FB uploads or Tweets throughout the entire time. What I am speaking of is do-able and done. Workstation-sharing and flexi work for professionals are also catching up fast in this region. This makes digital natives feel like they are part of the organisation. Unless HR proactively makes the workplace inclusive, young people start tuning out of the formal workplace fast.
The vision for HR firstly is to embrace technology and be proactive in adopting technology, bringing it in and creating avenues for expression and being non-judgmental. If you have the option of joining three jobs in three different sectors the place where you feel you can express yourself will appeal to you the most. If we are to be proactive, we can engage this young talent and harness them without pushing them out of our organisations.
Secondly, HR has a lead role in equating the playing field to help future talent to be competitive in the labour market. Simply put, it’s all about the supply and demand. If you take North or South or anywhere else in this country there is a lot of talent in remote areas. Where do you create opportunities for them to express themselves? They are still facing the ALs-to-university dilemma and when they come to the capital city they don’t have the same competitiveness because the benchmark for a good job in Colombo is rising by the day, not by the year.
We need to envision therefore, based on the economics of labour supply. I can’t find all the talent I need from the Western Province. Unless we create an equal playing field to push talent, HR is not going to get what it wants. So HR has to go out, conduct programs, engage more people and build talent in the regions proactively. That is one way to move out of the periphery and bring out the talent from all parts of the country and enable them to compete.
Thirdly, if you look at the global competitive index, Sri Lanka doesn’t rank very high, there are barriers to entering the market. Labour productivity doesn’t look attractive. What is the attraction for investors to create jobs that empower people economically? So again, high on the HR strategy agenda is to influence the removal of legislative barriers and have more enticing policies for investors, while at the same time managing employee interests and ensuring stability in employment.
Q: What do you have planned for HRP this year to raise the standard of HR?
A: On our HRP action agenda we are giving much focus to education this term, mainly content-driven education. We are partnering the Society for Human Resource Management in the US with SHRM India, by introducing a global certification and qualification which will give the HR professionals, CHROs and HR leaders in Sri Lanka a really innovative contemporary qualification.
Previously HRP offered a similar professional certification through IPMA US. HRP will also be delivering master courses co-created with premier professional bodies in the country on very relevant topics for the modern HR professional.
Apart from this, we are working with universities creating elective modules within regular degree programs. We can offer an elective that students can opt to take in their second year of the degree program. We already do it with the University of Colombo and we plan to expand to other identified universities.
Q: Can you tell me a bit about what the HR Awards are and what they represent to HR professionals?
A: The HRMAwards tend to assess the standard of HR in terms of systems, procedures, policies, the application and best practices used by corporates. In that spectrum of things, over the last 12 years HRP has delivered the HRM Awards starting with AON Hewitt.
This year for the first time HRP is working with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) India as the technical partner for HRM Awards 2014/15. HRP has repeatedly brought best-in-class global HR technical partners to Sri Lanka.
The award application is a comprehensive tool which assesses different very highly technical HR areas. It is similar to an HR audit and is in essence a good tool for any Board or CEO to assess the HR functionality within their organisation.
It is also a good mechanism for HR professionals to strive to be competitive and have confidence in projecting what they do and to be compared with a cross-section of industries and companies to see where they fit in.
So there is a learning aspect, a competitive aspect, a benchmarking aspect and a standardisation aspect.
The HRM Awards are held every two years and there is a very good reason for that; it’s because HR is a long-term investment. It’s about human capital and HRP does not believe in arranging competitions for the sake of distributing some award.
When an organisation participates at the HRM Awards organised by HRP, whether it is a winner or has been short-listed, the technical partner gives a detailed report like an audit report so the company can use it to revisit their processes and fix the ‘not so great’ areas. That is where the standardisation happens. As such we have a very topical learning conference inbetween the process, the calling for entries and starting the compilation of the questionnaire to site audits and then the awards. We put in a learning conference because we can bring the HR industry together to stimulate their thoughts and share contemporary knowledge topics by global and local experts.
Q: What is your evaluation of the field of HR in Sri Lanka and how does the HRP hope to cater to the needs of HR professionals?
A: I think HR in Sri Lanka has gained a lot of recognition over the years now. People at least have some understanding of HR. At a state level there is a National Labour Advisory Council and there is the formulation of national HR policies. If you look at the Government model of KSAM, the knowledge, skills, attitudes and mindset, you see a more holistic model. It’s not just the knowledge it’s also the skills, the attitude, the mindset and capacity of people, so that robustness has come in, in a fair manner. There are many State organisations which embody HR best practices.
In the private sector HR is more vibrant and more evolved. Perhaps the stakeholder accountabilities demand a higher standard of delivery and long-term investments and continual improvements have created buoyancy in the private sector HR.
Doing our part at the HRP, we have introduced HRM Awards, professional certifications, technical seminars to create knowledge and encourage best practice sharing. Especially for the State sector, at the fifth HR awards in 2012, we have introduced three special awards for State organisations. By doing this we’re trying to give them the confidence to compete and upscale their HR knowledge and practice.
Q: What plans does the HRP have to increase the standard of HR education among professionals and students?
A: Very soon we will be launching the SHRM qualification in Sri Lanka. It will be an affordable and content rich learning opportunity. Apart from that, as I said, there will be the master courses that will be co-created with premier professional bodies in Sri Lanka. While the SHRM qualification is predominantly a technical qualification, the master courses will give the busy HR professional a ready-made learning treat on contemporary HR topics. We will also continue to organise the usual evening meetings and seminars as well.
Q: How do Sri Lankan HR professionals need to alter their approach to HR as human resource management as opposed to personnel management?
A: This is where what I said first about getting that balance between finance and business acumen comes in. For example, if we are going to over-worry, micro-manage and make HR very operational, the function loses value and even makes your employees very frustrated.
Today you see people actually wasting a lot of time on such non-value-adding things. Modern day HR needs to move into tactical and strategic aspects. A lot of HR outfits are getting into being tactical but they are still not being very strategic. Being strategic is like seeing the future, pre-empting trends, embracing them and doing things before others.
"HR is not about all the fancy stuff. There is a lot of backstage work involved as well. If the strategies are the onstage activities, the backstage activities too need to happen and they need to be supervised. For instance a CHRO can’t just turn a blind eye and say I have someone else looking after the day-to-day stuff. It doesn’t work that way. You need to be hands-on across your dashboard because the absenteeism, the leave, productivity, health, all these things matter"
You also need to be very smart. Things like exclusivity arrangements have to come into place so that it provides a real edge over the others. The approach has to be different from moving out of the bottom of the pyramid issues to higher level things with strategic intent and of course prove it through consistency in delivering that way people begin to have faith in what HR is doing.
Tools like employee engagement surveys matter in the process of movement from operational to tactical to strategic levels and you can capture what your staff wants and bring solutions that are not alien to their needs and wants.
Q: How does the HR professional balance these roles being strategic, tactical and operational?
A: Well you need to proactively do that. HR is not about all the fancy stuff. There is a lot of backstage work involved as well. If the strategies are the onstage activities, the backstage activities too need to happen and they need to be supervised. For instance a CHRO can’t just turn a blind eye and say I have someone else looking after the day-to-day stuff. It doesn’t work that way. You need to be hands-on across your dashboard because the absenteeism, the leave, productivity, health, all these things matter.
Every HR leader needs to have that engagement across the entire spectrum of the HR portfolio.
What I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of ‘business as usual’ things that happen in a HR department and you can’t ignore them just because you’re in the top notch of the HR hierarchy, you also can’t say ‘that’s not my job, I have a manager looking after it’. So be it strategy or operations, it’s not one at the cost of the other but it’s about how you distribute your attention and allocate weightages so that everything moves along smoothly.
Pix by Lasantha Kumara
